Schools flooded with AI-generated complaints

Schools are dedicating time and resources to a “completely unsustainable” amount of AI-generated complaint letters, trust CEOs shared with Tes.

Trust senior leaders told the online magazine that, on top of a rising number of AI-generated complaints, schools have to spend more resources on dealing with them, such as dedicating more staff.

“We’ve now reached a point where it’s completely unsustainable,” said Lawrence Foley, CEO of Future Academies.

“For example, last week we had a permanent exclusion hearing for a pupil, and the parent had sent a 45-page letter, which included some tells of AI generation and was loaded with legalistic language.

“Our schools are getting five or six of these a week and then, as a trust, we’re receiving AI subject access and freedom of information requests.”

This is exacerbated by the fact that AI often uses incorrect references to legal clauses. For instance, Claire Pannell, director of governance at Anthem Schools Trust, said that such references can further complicate the review process, even though they can often be completely incorrect.

This means that schools will require additional support to respond to complaints, often having to deal with a formal complaints process.

“The issue for us is that it’s led to a more complex style of complaint coming in, which is harder to deal with. We’ve been getting these complaints coming in which you can tell straight away are written by AI,” Pannell said.

“They’re often longer, and the longer it is, the longer it takes to read and unpick. But probably the hardest thing is they often don’t make sense, and there will be references to random legislation.”

According to Dr Foley, parents are increasingly escalating the issue directly with Ofsted and the Teaching Regulation Agency, approaching them with AI-generated complaints.

“We end up getting letters from the Department for Education and other bodies seeking assurances about these, and that really multiplies the workload,” he said.

Dr Foley would like to see a change to the complaints process, where parents are required to ‘exhaust the process’ of going through the school or trust’s policy before being able to approach a regulator, unless the complaint is about a headteacher or CEO.